Update: Apparently everything has been worked out to the satisfaction of both parties, so you can ignore the warning email, but the lesson still holds.

Here’s what just landed in my email box:

Hi Wendy,

Violation of Terms and Conditions of PrivateLabelMonthly.com.

DO NOT BUY InstantAdsenseTemplates.com from Joel Comm and Eric
Holmlund.

InstantAdsenseTemplates.com has violated our Terms and Conditions
by bundling the products of PrivateLabelMonthly.com and reselling
them to the public. This is in direct competition of
PrivateLabelMonthly.com and its members and had violated the
membership terms and conditions.

As a valued subscriber we would like to protect your interests and
have contacted them to immediately cease and desist. We have
already contacted our attorney. Contingent on their response, we
will take legal action.

To Your Success,
Michael and Anthony
PrivateLabelMonthly.com

Note: I am no longer a member of Private Label Monthly (see this post to find out why) , and I didn’t buy Instant Adsense Templates because I read that they use tables instead of CSS, making their claims of being perfectly optimized false, so I’ve got no vested interest in either package.

It does raise the problem, however, of the multitude of terms and conditions being written and interpreted by non-lawyers, and how easy it is to ignore or misread them.

Which is why one of my new policies is to NEVER buy templates or headers to use as-is. I’ve heard too many stories of marketers being contacted by Corbis attorneys, as an example, because of an image in a template they were assured was private label.

With the legal departments of these image aggregators smelling cash, diligence is the most valuable virtue a marketer can have when dealing with graphics and templates.

And with ever changing terms for private label products, and the actual legality behind private label content in question in the first place, perhaps the best thing for the wary marketer to do is to always assume the strictest possible interpretation of the terms rather than the most lax.